DAVID MURDOCK: Me and my shadow

Sunday

Jul 21, 2013 at 12:01 AM

A couple of nights ago, I walked out into my driveway to throw a bag of garbage into my trash can.

By David MurdockSpecial to The Times

A couple of nights ago, I walked out into my driveway to throw a bag of garbage into my trash can. On my way back into the house, I looked down and jumped about a mile straight up. Well, maybe not a literal mile, but I jumped. I was literally scared of my own shadow. I don’t know why I jumped like I did, but I got a big laugh out of it later. “Scared of his own shadow” is a cliché, but it wasn’t that night. I was sort of distracted, trying to put together in my mind all the things I had to do for the next day. When I’m thinking about something, I am easily startled. However, I’m usually startled by living beings, not my own shadow. I’m surprised that the streetlight cast enough light to make a shadow big enough to startle me.Of course, the experience got me to thinking about shadows.“Shadow” is one of our more basic words in English. By that, I mean that it comes straight from Middle English and means “shadow” or “shade.” Many words in English have metaphorical origins, but our words to describe easily understandable concepts do not. The general idea is that if a person can put a hand on something concrete, the word for that thing is usually not metaphorical. The word “hand,” for example, comes from a Middle English word that means “hand.” The word “metaphor,” on the other hand, comes from a Greek word that means “to transfer.” The origin of the word “metaphor,” therefore, is metaphorical.The observation that “shadow” is a basic word that is somehow “concrete” cracks me up. No one can put a hand on a shadow, but the origin of the word implies that people once felt that we could.Our literature is chock-full of references to shadows. One of the most charming references is a riddle: “Only one color, but not one size, / Stuck at the bottom, yet easily flies. / Present in sun, but not in rain, / Doing no harm, and feeling no pain.” I think the source for that form of the riddle is J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” but it sounds older to me.Shadows are usually threatening in some way in the literary references. Shadows are associated quite often with death. In “The Odyssey” by Homer, for example, Odysseus travels to Hades, the place of the dead in Greek mythology, to ask advice and direction from the ghost of the prophet and seer Tiresias. When the souls of the dead surround Odysseus, Homer describes them as “shades.” The psychologist Carl Jung used the word “shadow” to describe the darker side of our personality that we reject. In Jung’s thinking, that dark shadow lies deep inside our minds because we repress it. However, it is there. Jung didn’t necessarily think it was evil; his “shadow” simply does not exist in our consciousness, which might be thought of as the light. I’ve often wondered if the creators of the old radio-play character “The Shadow” were thinking of Jung’s theories. After all, “Who know what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”Of course, there are references to shadows all through the Bible. Many of those references have a threatening edge, like the famous “Valley of the Shadow of Death” from Psalm 23. However, shadows in the Bible can mean other things. For example, the shadow is a metaphor for the brevity of human life. To Job, “our days on earth are a shadow.” My favorite references to shadows in the Bible are to comforting images like in Psalm 36: “How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings.”That’s how I normally view the shadows. There is nothing so wonderful in those stupidly hot and humid days of high summer in the South as a shadow. I’ve always been amazed on days like these when I walk out of the sun into the edge of a wood. The temperature noticeably changes, and there is nothing more refreshing than the shadows of the trees.I still cannot tell y’all why I jumped at my shadow the other night. Maybe it was just looking down and seeing “something” that I didn’t expect at my feet. I jumped just about as high one time when I nearly stepped on a big old copperhead. A copperhead is more dangerous than a shadow, though. However, both that copperhead years ago and my shadow the other night had the exact same reaction. When I jumped, both took off. The copperhead slithered off quickly into the underbrush, and my shadow jumped just as high as I did.

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